The day was delightful. The water was superb. The sun was full and bright. A few billowy, puffy clouds floated through the sky. They were white, cumulus, fluffy fellows, the type that excite many a child as they gaze into the heavens. In parks, on lawns, little ones were likely looking up and pointing. "Look," they might say, "It is a horse, a donkey, or perchance a unicorn." It was a day for whimsy.
I hope everyone else here is as shocked and angry at NBC's latest "reality" show, "The Baby Borrowers." NBC has gone right past taking advantage of unfortunate adults for entertainment purposes and directly into child abuse by taking children who are far too young to understand what's happening away from their parents for 3 days.
If you have any shred of doubt that this is actual child abuse, below the fold is a letter from people who know about child abuse first-hand, those dedicated to taking care of children.
Please contact NBC, and especially it's sponsors, and tell them how outrageous it is for a national TV network to engage in child abuse. List of sponsors and contact info is below the fold.
NBC makes it difficult to just e-mail them. you go to this page:
http://www.nbc.com/...
I just came across this disturbing AP article in yahoo news. A report by Save the Children UK has uncovered widespread sexual abuse of children by UN peacekeepers and aid workers. The UN is not denying the report and trusts that because of the reputation of the charity conducting the research, the report is fair.
"A tiny proportion of peacekeepers and aid workers are abusing the children they were sent to protect. It ranges from sex for food to coerced sex. It's despicable."
At the U.N. headquarters, spokeswoman Michele Montas said Ban "is deeply concerned" by the report.
"We welcome this report. It's fair, and I think it's essentially accurate," Montas said.
She noted the report states the United Nations has already undertaken steps designed to tackle the problem, from establishing conduct and discipline units in all U.N. missions to strengthening training for all categories of U.N. personnel. She said the United Nations also needs to strengthen its investigative capacity.
Please keep this diary on the rec list as its time to recommend has expired and it is about to leave the rec list. For the first time ever I will not be posting a tip jar. Sometime around 1-2, somebody else should link my diary and the original and put that on the rec list so this remains a news story through all the newscasts tonights. Then unrecommend this diary.
This is a story about a kindergarten teacher who decided to have a little boy come up in front of the class, have sixteen 5-6 year olds tell that child everything they disliked about him, and then the teacher had the 16 students vote whether or not to remove the child from the classroom. 2 students bravely withstood the teacher's bullying and said no.
For some of us--especially those of us who have followed Huckabee's extensive links with the highly militaristic "Joel's Army"/"Joshua Generation" neopente dominionist movement--this is but the latest and one of the more blatant of his statements of this type, and probably not even the most extreme of them.
In today's special edition post, we give a bit of history on this.
It is May 9, 1955. A studio arts major at UMCP interning at a local TV station has been asked to develop a short show based on contemporary versions of 4,000-year-old toys, no doubt partly because of his experience watching such shows and his work for the station when he was in high school.
On May 9, Sam and Friends debuts, and already viewers can see a difference between this college student's new vision of the craft and that of most in the field. Where the standard figures use wooden figures and strings, this 19-year-old trailblazer has attached wires to his foam rubber creations as he and his assistant, fellow UMCP student Jane Nebel, act out short scenes on television with their inanimate (yet very animated) characters.
Technically, these figures cannot be called puppets. They cannot be called marionettes. The term used to describe them, muppets, becomes synonymous with their creator, Jim Henson. (Oh, and Henson will marry that assistant four years later.)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Suicide victims who were abused as children have clear genetic changes in their brains, Canadian researchers reported on Tuesday in a finding they said shows neglect can cause biological effects.
The findings offer potential ways to find people at high risk of suicide, and perhaps to treat them and prevent future suicides.
And, the researchers said, they also offer insights into how neglect and abuse can perpetuate unhealthy behavior through the generations.
Moshe Szyf of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues studied the brains of 18 men who committed suicide and who were also abused or neglected as children, and compared them to 12 men who also died suddenly but from other causes, and who were not abused, although some had various psychiatric problems such as anxiety disorders.
Despite claims that have arisen onsite that 'no documentation' of child abuse exists to back up the Texas authorities' decision to raid the FLDS compound, AP today provided yet more emerging details of the results of the raid.
And so, while everyone is talking about the polygamist sect in Texas, Virginia has its own sect. I was watching the late local news the other night and a story appeared about a sect in Virginia.
And this is frightening to think that he we are in 2008, and such abuse occurs. Listening to the women and their justifications for being in such marriages sickened me. More beneath the fold.
I’ve been away for over a month getting moved into the new house, which meant packing and unpacking two households (boy, was my mother a packrat), painting the master bedroom and bathroom and the dining room to mitigate the depressing effect of the Tacky Khaki the builders painted the entire house, and getting an 87-year-old deaf and cranky father settled in.
Frankly, I haven’t missed the campaign diaries at all. But when I got back, I did search to see what had been said about the Texas polygamy case. I wasn’t surprised that there were only 4 diaries on it. This sort of issue is frequently ignored here. Three of them were about the possible violation of the religious freedom of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the sloppy handling of the raid, and how terrible it was that these people are being persecuted for being weird or different and members of a non-mainstream faith. I wish I could say that surprised me, but it didn’t. Certainly the protection of civil liberties is extremely important--but so is protecting children and women
The other day, the Pope seemed like he was going to defy expectations with a show of righteousness, addressing the child abuse epidemic that infests America's priests. Instead, he delivered remarks that proved to be just as bad as if he had said nothing at all.
I once started a novel titled Crazy Pussy, but abandoned it later as an exercise in bad judgment. It was based on a woman I once knew. Unspeakable things had been done to her. She was a strange mix of beauty and darkness, tenderness and rage, passion and loathing. She captured me without my having fired a shot in my own defense. Our’s was a raging roller coaster of earthly delights and bone deep horror.
In the wake of the Texas raid on a compound of Warren Jeffs' followers, we have seen diaries examining the 'lifestyle' of the FLDS splinter sect, and several that seemed written to propose that Texas lawmen had made a horrible mistake, and that these simple religious folk were being terribly persecuted for their beliefs and life choices...
The raid at the FLDS polygamist sect in Texas has revealed a few things - both about them, and about the people who live in the same god forsaken state I do.
The Mohawk Nation News is reporting that 28 mass graves of many Indian Children have been discovered in Canada. Many of these are at residential schools. Some of the schools were government run, others were parochial, including Catholic...I wonder if the pope is aware of this?
I'm no fan of the death penalty. However, some people are. For example, George Bush signed 152 death warrants while he was governor of Texas. This gives him the distinction of signing more death warrants than any other governor in US history. No extenuating circumstances stayed his hand.
Bush leaves no doubt he unreservedly supports the death penalty as meted out by the courts. In his book A Charge to Keep, he explained his 152 death warrants by saying, "I dont believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own." His unambiguous stance in support of executing convicted felons suggests he would support the Supreme Court extending the range of crimes punishable by death.
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will be asked to decide whether it's ok to execute someone for raping a child. Should they rule this a capital crime, it will set a precedent of particular interest in some quarters. After all, we know what happened in "Abooga Rape." Impeachment will be a slap on the wrist compared to the punishment waiting for Bush and the "NSC Principals" should they find themselves on the recieving end of these rulings.
ELDORADO, Texas - Child welfare officials following up on an abuse complaint took custody of 18 girls who lived at a secretive West Texas religious retreat built by polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.
A total of 52 girls, ages 6 months to 17 years, were bused away on Friday to be interviewed, but only 18 were immediately taken into state custody, said Texas Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner. No arrests had been made.
Meisner said welfare officials were looking for foster homes for the girls, most of whom have rarely been outside the insular world of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
My view of why philosophies are good but religions are not, below the fold.
A recent report shows that 1 in 50 infants will be abused or neglected in the first year of life, many in the first weeks.
http://www.cnn.com/... This is a national disgrace, in my opinion. Childrens advocacy is a passion of mine. It's been a driving force for me for many years now. Child abuse is a cancer in our society and it comes in many forms, physical, emotional, and sexual.
Annually, there are almost 3 million reports of child abuse in the U.S. and it is probable that there are many more victims that go unreported. It is commonly accepted that the statistics we have to work with are but the tip of the iceberg. Due to the nature of the offenses, fear, shame, and other factors often deter reporting. Child abuse all too frequently is unseen, hidden, or even ignored. Children are the most vulnerable group in our society. If we, the adults, do not speak for them, defend them, protect them, I assure you, no one will.
